PERFECT combination

PERFECT team:
VIMS grad student Samuel Lake shows off his York River Watershed board game with his partner teacher, Kristin Kelley, a science instructor at York High School. The NSF-funded GK-12 program puts Lake and other scientists in classrooms of middle schools and high schools regularly. Kelley’s class has shown a marked increase in SOL passage rates since entering the program.

The students learn science, while the scientists learn to teach

by Joseph McClain
| April 4, 2012

Theresa Davenport was having some
trouble with a football player.

Davenport was explaining to a
biology class at Grafton High School about some of the problems that can stem
from seawater that is low in oxygen. The football player, “who was as sweet as
he could be,” she says, was having a hard time understanding how water gets to
be low in oxygen in the first place.

“He kept asking me ‘But where does
the oxygen go?’” she said. After a
few minutes Davenport understood the problem.

“He didn’t understand that oxygen
is dissolved in water,” she said. “It finally hit me that he was picturing the
water molecules splitting apart and then organisms using that oxygen—the O in H2O.
He was mixing up his chemical concepts, not his biological concepts.”

Once she understood the problem, it
only took Davenport, a master’s student in biological science at VIMS, a minute
to explain the concept of dissolved aquatic oxygen and how it differs from
molecular oxygen. The football player got it.

Opportunities for
mutual revelations

Such mutual revelations between student and
teacher are frequent in the science classes that participate in the GK-12
PERFECT program at VIMS. This STEM-outreach initiative, supported by the
National Science Foundation, partners graduate students from VIMS with local
science teachers.

Kam Tang, associate professor of marine
science at VIMS and director of the program, says the GK-12 program addresses a
number of needs from the VIMS point of view. For one thing, he says, the NSF
funding provides some additional financial support for VIMS master’s and Ph.D.
students. Secondly, the program gives the VIMS students some classroom teaching
experience, an opportunity that’s somewhat rare in the predominantly
graduate-level programs of William & Mary’s marine science school.

“I plan to teach in the future,
hopefully at the undergraduate level,” said Samuel Lake, a Ph.D. student in
biological science who is in his second year of a GK-12 fellowship at York High
School. “I’m getting ideas on ways I can present different things and do
activities and make things hands-on that you would normally have to do in a
lecture setting.”

Lake, Davenport and the other GK-12
fellows typically spend a full day twice a week at their partner schools. In
accordance with the program’s title behind the PERFECT acronym—Partnership between Educators and Researchers for
Enhancing Classroom Teaching—the fellows forge important links between
William & Mary/VIMS and the K-12 community,

“VIMS people have been doing that
on and off in different capacities but I think the GK 12 intensifies or
increases interactions with the local K12 community,” Tang said.
“I think that’s a good thing.”

Base pairs: One
scientist, one teacher

The number of GK-12 fellows varies
between eight and 12 each year. Vicki Clark, one of the GK-12 project managers,
explains that in 2012, there are GK-12 partnerships with five schools, three
high schools and two middle schools. Each fellow is paired with a teacher. A VIMS
GK-12 fellow may find him- or herself teaching anything from introductory earth
science to chemistry, biology and sometimes even marine science. The fellows
and their partner teachers start their collaboration in the summer.

“Sometimes during the summer, the
teachers are working with the grad students on their research projects here at
VIMS with and sometimes the graduate students are at the school working with
the teachers to get ready for the school year,” Clark
explained.

The summer preparation also
includes what Clark describes as a “boot camp” on science education methods,
conducted by herself and fellow GK-12 program manager
and “den mother” Carol Hopper Brill, a marine education specialist at VIMS.

“We discuss a little bit about how
students learn and the different ways the fellows can prepare lessons and
different learning strategies and protocols you need to understand a little bit
about before you get started in the classroom,” Clark said. “But most of the
experience is gained on the job in the classroom and in the field.”

No dumbing-down, even
when they cry

Christie Pondell got some
unexpected experience when she made a couple of students cry. It was early in her
fellowship at Booker T. Washington Middle School in Newport News, a
marine-science magnet school. Pondell, a Ph.D. student in the VIMS physical
science department, was teaching a chemistry lesson to a class of eighth
graders. The boys sitting up front were getting it, Pondell said, but tears
erupted when she called on a couple of girls in the back of the room.

“It was chemical bonding and
making ions and—well, valence electrons can be scary,” she said. “But, I was
dumbfounded. I said to myself, OK, we’re going to have to explain this a
different way. Not dumb down the science, but just find a different way to
explain it.”

Pondell invited the girls to come
in during lunch and they went over the material again. By drawing circles to
show the electrons’ positions in the outer orbital shell, Pondell found a
different way to explain the science, while the eighth graders, tearful no
longer, understood how valence electrons combine with the electrons of other
atoms to form chemical bonds.

The
GK-12 program is in its third year of five at VIMS and has recorded some
impressive results. The program tracks the attitudes and degrees of
understanding of the students toward science and scientists. In a survey at the
beginning of the course, few of the students say they want to become scientists.
Although, as Davenport points out, many of them really did.

“So many of them were putting ‘I
want to be a doctor,’ ‘I want to be a forensic crime scene investigator,’ ‘I
want to be a vet,’ yet they were putting ‘No, I don’t want to be a scientist’,”
she said. “They were missing that connection—that some of these things that
they think are really interesting are science.”

Success stories

Clark says evaluations of the
GK-12 experiences show that the students attain a more realistic understanding
of science and a better, more positive view of scientists and what they do.

The GK-12 programs have other
success stories to tell as well. Kristin
Kelley, a science teacher at York High School, has been participating in the GK-12
programs for three years, working with Sam Lake for the past two. Lake says Kelley’s
earth science students logged a 99 percent passage rate on the most recent of
Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) tests—up from a passage rate that
wavered between 60 and 70 percent.

“She only had one kid fail. I think that’s an amazing feat,”
Lake said. “I think part of it is that she’s a good teacher. I think another
part of it is the fact that for the last three years, she and a GK-12 a fellow
have been working together to not only teach the material but to redesign the
course in different ways and make it better and more efficient for the
students.”